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Some thoughts about mooted changes to Media ownership law in Australia
People are creatures of habit and it is only that so many people are habituated to buying the news papers that any are still being sold at all. Just take any kind of commute on public transport and consider how many people are reading a paper and how many are staring at a screen instead. Some certainly may be playing games or even watching video but I expect that they will be out numbering those who are still reading dead tree editions of the MSM.
Then there is the things in the paper that people buy them for, most papers are not exclusively about politics and current affairs anyway, so some readers will be buying the paper for its coverage of sport, lifestyle or even just for the crossword puzzles. My point is that the political classes (in particular those from the left ) just look at the raw sales figured and they think that every reader of the Herald Sun is in the thrall of Rupert Murdoch and that the owners dictate to their readers directing their opinions. The reality is that all media entities write to their audience. If they don’t their audience wither away quite quickly. With the coming of the internet this is even more how things work Online entities are even more in an endless quest for readers so you have to play to what your readers want rather than thinking that you can manipulate their thinking. I have been writing a blog for nearly a decade now and I have noticed just how quickly particular readers flit in and out its the same now with the way that people read things online from the likes of Murdoch, Fairfax or even the Guardian People don’t just get their news from one source any more no matter what the subject is they will read what several sources say about it and then make up their mind. This behaviour is the same when it comes to broadcast TV people flit form one channel to another seeking different perspectives. My argument is simple, if the media consumers have changed their habits then perhaps there is something in the notion that media diversity laws from the last century should perhaps reflect those changes as well.
Cheers Comrades
The nature of the warming faith and the warning of another alarmist book to come…
With the amusing knowledge that one of my favourite Waminista journalist, the Ages’s Jo Chandler , has written a book about climate change (called Feeling the heat ) due out in May. I can’t help wondering just what qualifies her to write on this subject?
Nothing in her biography suggests a scientific background, and her earlier suggestion that AGW was responsible for last year’s flood event in Pakistan utterly destroys her credibility about any discussion of the climate further as a self confessed Luddite* one has to wonder just what she could possibly bring to the debate on “climate change”. You can be sure that it won’t be an objective mind or sound reasoning. Maybe there is still a quid in it.
My best guess is that it will be more of the leaps of faith that were so evident in her piece about the floods in Pakistan where she will look at every dramatic weather event and make some claim about just how it proves “climate change” is real and all the fault of Western industrial society. As the cute animation above suggests Climate alarmists will grab hold of any thing that fits the tenants of their faith and just ignore any “inconvenient truths” that contradict their climate liturgy just as Chandler has in relation to floods in Pakistan.
Anyway I’ll keep my eyes pealed for the release of the book which will undoubtedly take a rather short time to be remaindered and then relegated to the “humorous pseudo-science” category right alongside such credible greats like Erich von Däniken None the less it may be good for a laugh because I’m rather sure that it will be very far from useful to understanding any of the scientific issues at hand if her previous sycophantic writings on the subject are anything to go by.
Cheers Comrades
*She confessed to being a Luddite in an email to yours truly
Hat tip to Andrew Bolt for the vid BTW
The validation process
Our Warminista friends have been rather quiet lately about “runaway global warming’ mainly because their credibility has been shot to pierces over the Cliamategate scandal and the fact that the weather has simply not been playing ball with their dire predictions at all. Nowhere is this more so than in the United kingdom, Europe and North America where we have seen three years of colder than usual winters. Now I expect that warming fools like our resident J(trust me I’m a scientist but I won’t tell you what I am qualified in)M will insist that what we are seeing here is “weather” and that it is not the same as “climate”, well frankly I think that JM is talking out of his over rated (by himself) arse.
Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.
He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.
He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.
He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.
I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more. Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.
Is he barmy? Of course he may be just a fluke-artist. It may be just luck that he has apparently predicted recent weather patterns more accurately than government-sponsored scientists. Nothing he says, to my mind, disproves the view of the overwhelming majority of scientists, that our species is putting so much extra CO? into the atmosphere that we must expect global warming.
The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun. Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.
Weather is to climate in the same way that the one millimetre mark is to the the one Metre mark on a measuring stick, it really is just a matter of “scale” because when you get enough “weather” measurements and consider them together you get climate. Surely this is an uncontentious observation on my part? You see I can’t get past the fact that despite the claims that “this is one of the hottest years on record” we have experienced a rather cooler and somewhat wetter year here in my part of the world and that I have been consistently seeing reports of record cold temperatures in the northern hemisphere so I wonder just how the “hottest year” claim is arrived at because as far as I understand how averages work if large parts of the planet have experienced extraordinary cold weather this year then it must be the case that more of the planet has had extraordinarily warm weather for longer periods than usual but I have heard no such reports of longer and hotter summers … well at least not enough to balance out the reports of colder and more severe winters
I freely admit my limitations on the science and the maths but I do know that those who make dire predictions and prognostications about the weather and climate require more than just a bit of luck which is why we see most predictions drawn on a scale larger than the seer’s lifetime. That way the prognosticator can safely sell their predictions to the world knowing that they will never have to answer the obvious questions when they are shown by events to have been on the wrong track.
Personally I reckon that the next couple of Christmases will be just as white as the last few in the UK and I base that on nothing more than a sort primal “I feel it in my water” instinct unlike the sort of assertions we get from our Warminista friends I admit that I could be entirely wrong and that with humility we all have to accept that the only true validation of any prediction comes in the fullness of time.
Cheers Comrades
The only way that they can even dream of propagating the faith is with the point of a bayonet on the barrel of a Green gun
Everybody Dance Now!!!!!
I have been saying for ages that there is a very large measure of totalitarian imperialism in the imagination and intentions of followers of the Green Religion and I found it revealing that a piece in today’s Age would be so frank about advocating the use of force to make sure that the requirements of the climate change catechism are met by those of countries who don’t want to fall into the right rhythmically approved climate dance.
If we are to make peace with the climate, we must first win the struggle against the carbon-industrial complex and its proxy wars (over climate science and renewable baseload electricity). We only deserve to win if we are prepared to enforce climate security through trade sanctions or, ultimately, force itself. We need a powerful international environment court to remove the social licence to pollute. The climate polluter that undermines clean technology is the Napoleon of our era.
A coalition for climate protection will be able to take action without waiting endlessly for an impossible 100 per cent consensus.
Our best and brightest economists will be able to redesign trade law to fairly reward those inside and penalise those outside the treaty, in the most economically efficient way possible.
Nothing short of this will generate momentum towards zero emissions in the developed world and low emissions in the developing world and China. An enforceable regime of climate law will, like 19th-century treaties of Vienna, require an alliance based around at least some great powers. But staying with a non-binding treaty model means we are all unhappy and the planet is doomed. Good diplomacy is, as always, about taking what you can get.
Dan Cass was the Australian Conservation Foundation’s official observer at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. He is a lobbyist.
There is a certain desperation among the Profit$ of the faithful because the credulity of the public is in such serious decline that the only way that they can even dream of propagating the faith is with the point of a bayonet on the barrel of a Green gun. Hmm does anyone remember that Lenin said once “all power comes from the barrel of a gun”? well its seems that those purveyors of this ideology are at last being honest enough to say in public what has been obvious for a very long time; if you can’t convince people that what you say is true then they will just have to be forced to believe it or else!
Cheers Comrades
The right tool for the job? Or the Age misses the point.
All religions seem to need their inspired and and inspiring devotees, Those individuals who have through their own example led the faithful and reinforce the beliefs of those in doubt. Why else do they strive so hard for their beliefs? Oh its easy to scoff as so many of our friends from the left are keen to do yet how many of them would cheerfully stand in a line in red square to file past the mortal remains of Lenin? perhaps they have made a point of visiting that grave in London where the bones of Karl Marx lay mouldering. Or even wet their pants at the thought of spending time in the company a “great profit” of their faith like Tim Flannery or Al Gore?
Saint or demon, it all depends upon what you believe and what gives you comfort. As a life long atheist I am endlessly fascinated by the nature of belief, I almost obsessively listen to the religion programs on Radio National, I have many friends for whom faith in the deity is the sun around which their lives orbit. I suppose that is why I see the religiosity of the “climate change” argument and the fundamentalism of its devotees.
Jo Chandler, rabid about climate change
Jo Chandler appears to be one of The Age’s more rabid Climate Change writers who has been very quick to claim AGW as the cause of more recent recent natural disasters like the extensive flooding in Pakistan and to plug the views of David Suzuki and help promote his latest Misanthropic tome and his current tour to Australia from his native Canada ,well he is a Warminista Profit after all, strangely if you read through all of the pieces listed under her name on the Age website you will find lots of Socialism and lots “we are all doomed because of the climate that is being wrecked by humanity* ” stuff along with the usual lefty feminist stuff about childbirth mortality rates in the third world. In fact you could be forgiven for thinking that this writer has done alright out of natural disasters managing to get her employer to pay for some pretty neat junkets to Africa and even to Antarctica. Surprisingly given her rather obvious disdain for Christianity she was given the task (or did she ask?) of writing a piece about the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. and what she gives us is a thinly veiled suggestion that its all about the religious tourism dollar.
They browse the narrative of her life, believers, sceptics and scoffers alike emerging intrigued and awed at her journey – from a pauper’s birth on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, to Rome, where she obtained authority for her radical vision of free education and self-government for her sisters, and now finally to sainthood, via Penola. She travelled so far against the tide of patriarchy and power. She was compelled by the noblest of missions, and by all accounts achieved it all with grace, generosity and good humour. Mere mortals cannot help but ask – how did she do it?
At this point, visitors wanting to really grasp her spirit might be disappointed that she is still, at least in a material sense, so elusive. There is little left of the harsh, pioneer reality she lived in. Penola is flush on the fruit of nearby vines. Old buildings endure but the asphalt on the pilgrim’s trail is so new it is barely set. The less pious might console themselves with gastronomic nourishment, and drop into the tapas bar for a plate of Mary McScallops ($20). Or indulge in some venal retail therapy at the store around the corner where Nun-Chucks (”Repent Or Else”) are selling like hotcakes.
The thing is I can’t help but think that despite her conclusion to this piece which tries to claim MacKillop as some kind of socialist saint what she has delivered to her readers is precisely the same sort of piece that she writes in her “travel” pieces. The articles that she puts together in payment for a family holiday to Vietnam with her children or even the junket** she managed to arrange for her unnamed husband:
The Bay of Fires guided walk is run by Anthology, the company that also runs the Cradle Mountain guided trek. The excuse I’ve employed to get here, to pull on hiking boots and scratch that itch, is the beloved’s dreaded milestone birthday – halfway to 100 but emphatically not middle aged.
What better present for a bloke with prematurely dodgy hips, a visceral loathing of sand and a deep suspicion of group itineraries than a long walk on an endless beach in the company of strangers? I’d have to go along, of course. I keep it as a birthday surprise until the plane lifts off for Launceston. He’s plainly speechless with delight.
He recovers somewhat when we arrive at the handsome Quamby Estate, on the first night of a four-night itinerary. The grand 180-year-old homestead is plonked in a postcard bucolic scene of rolling hills.
It is precisely this inherent contradiction between the socialist aspirations of our urban lefties and their love and delight in the expensive “high life” that I find so amusing and which makes the epithet “latte sipper” or “Chardonnay socialist” so apt. It is also why Chandler is such a poor choice to write about an event like the creation of this country’s first Saint. She clearly has no real appreciation of what this event means to people of the Catholic Faith because if she did she would not be cynically treating it like one of her touristy “places to visit” pieces or trying to present the woman’s life and that of her followers as a version of a socialist utopians.To appreciate MacKillop you have to understand that there was a faith agenda for the woman and her followers that owes much more to Jesus Christ than it does to Karl Marx, there is certainly no acknowledgement of that in Chandlers piece but it is the fundamental reason that Mary MacKillop is being made a saint today and you would have to think that a major news paper like the Age should have done better in its choice of author on this topic. Jo Chandler certainly seems to be a tool but she is just not the right one for this job.
Cheers Comrades
*a paraphrase of Chandler’s position on AGW
** strangely for a lefty Chandler seems to be awful keen on a “free lunch” and it is not uncommon to find a quiet little disclaimer at the end of her pieces pointing out just who picked up the tab, for instance when you see “Jo Chandler travelled courtesy of Tourism Tasmania.” it suggests to me that the bits in the article about her arranging something special for her “beloved” is actually a bit of bullshit.. An even more worrying example of her propensity for chowing down into the trough of promotional freebies comes in her piece about a gas project in New Guinea where the disclaimer at the end says:Jo Chandler travelled from Port Moresby to the PNG LNG sites with assistance from Oil Search. Oh dear how can she reconcile her Warminista pretensions and accepting the largess of an oil and gas company?
Hot and cold
This is a good example of just how the Warministas are propagating their faith to our children. Now while they are very keen to wrap their millenarian beliefs in scientific vestments what they are really about is the the old fashioned emotional arguments. So you take a trio of pretty young people, a singer and two athletes ,and you send them on a jaunt to Antarctica and bob is your uncle you get the opportunity to spread the faith to gullible young people through their “right on” feelings about “saving the planet”
Hayley Warner, Malcolm Lynch and Narelle Long travel to Antarctic for three weeks as part of Earth Hour. Photo: Peter Rae
Nickelodeon is set to make climate change awareness “cool” among children with its new documentary, Cool School.
The documentary follows last year’s Australian Idol runner-up Hayley Warner on an adventure to the world’s first environmental school in the Antarctica to take on the harsh elements and learn some global warming lessons.
The 18-year-old singer spent two weeks aboard a Russian icebreaker along with indigenous AFL player Malcolm Lynch and indigenous Australian track star Narelle Long.
Lynch and Long made history by becoming the first young indigenous Australians to set foot on Antarctica.
Warner admits the group copped some scary conditions.
“I’m pretty sure I had a nugget in my pants, we were all packing it,” she laughed.
“We were told to really look after ourselves aboard because if we fell off we would have died.”
Its times like this that I am glad that I have not signed up for Pay TV because frankly the ABC is Bolshie enough about AGW without me paying to bring more of the religious dogma into this house.
Cheers Comrades
Iain Hall's SANDPIT 